Author: Elizabeth Coppock

Counting riddle solved and so much more!

I presented the counting riddle that Sunita Junu had published on Tiktok with her daughter to Dipak Tudladhar. I asked if he recognized it. Dipak told me that it reminded him of a song that he had learned when he was young! I asked him to write it down for me and translate it. I […]

Dipak Tuladhar’s language preservation campaign

Here is Dipak Tuladhar in his office with Newar curriculum that he developed. It was fascinating and inspiring to meet Dipak Tuladhar, who founded the Modern Newa English School in Kathmandu in 2003. It was the first minority language preschool in Nepal. At the time when he started, children were forbidden from speaking anything but Nepali in […]

Typing in Newar

I learned how to type in Newar! Dipak Tuladhar taught me. No more studying long tables to find a match and copy-pasting. No more Google Lens to grab the character. Typing any letter, like a boss, even ones with ligatures (which are apparently called half-letters). The easiest way to type on a computer is with […]

Newari counting riddle (line 1)

Nepal Bhasa language teacher/activist Sunita Junu, who can be found not only on Facebook but also on TikTok, has posted a video with her daughter reciting this Newar counting riddle. @sunita.junu एकमोहर एकमोहर – एकरुपैया हामी दुइजना – बेरियौँ नि ऊ त्यो मान्छेले – हेर्यो नि पुरानो घर – भत्कायो नि बगलामुखी महादेवको मन्दिर – […]

Field trip to Nepal!

I am going on sabbatical this fall, and I’ve decided to visit Nepal! Why Nepal? It sits at the crossroads of several different language families, the two biggest being Indo-Aryan from the west and south, including the national language Nepali, an Indo-Aryan language (closely related to Hindi) Tibeto-Burman (part of Sino-Tibetan, more closely related to […]

Prof. Coppock delivers keynote address at Amsterdam Colloquium 2024

Prof. Coppock was among the keynote speakers at Amsterdam Colloquium 2024. Her talk was entitled “Metrology and Mereology”. Download the slides from the talk here. Here is the abstract: This talk is about metrology and mereology. Of these, the latter is more familiar to formal semanticist, and, in conjunction with event semantics, has been of […]

African Linguistics Society kicks off!

On Friday October 18th, we will have our first meeting of the African Linguistics Club, with a talk by Ousmane Cisse and Elizabeth Coppock on the X-woo-X construction in Mandinka, an interesting way of expressing distributivity through reduplication. The talk will take place in the African Studies Center’s seminar room at 232 Bay State Road, […]

New paper on distributivity via reduplication in Mandinka!

The Proceedings of Triple A 10 have just been published, including a contribution by BU PhD student Ousmane Cisse and Prof. Elizabeth Coppock entitled “Reduplicated distributivity in Mandinka”. Here is a PDF of the published paper, and here is the video of our talk:   Cite as: Cisse, Ousmane and Elizabeth Coppock (2024). Reduplicated Distributivity […]

LiSLab represents at Experiments in Linguistic Meaning 3

Elizabeth Coppock, David Beaver and Emily Richardson made a contribution to the third Experiments in Linguistic Meaning conference entitled “Ordering is not ranking: A study of ordinals vs. degree modifiers in nested definites”. The slides are here.

Prof. Coppock presents in Budapest

Prof. Coppock gave a talk at the Hungarian Research Center for Linguistics in May, entitled “Division and distributivity: The case of Hungarian -nként”. The slides are here.